Going Green…In the Bathroom

Eco-consciousness has made its way into all facets of our lives, including, yes—the bathroom. When drying your hands after a trip to a public bathroom, you’re generating waste if you’re using paper towels.

Paper towels might be useful for drying your freshly-washed hands, but they put unnecessary strain on the environment. To produce one tonne of paper towels, 17 trees must be cut down and 20,000 gallons of water are used. In one year at work, the average person uses a many as 3,000 individual towels in the bathroom, which makes it as financially wasteful as it is environmentally irresponsible.

Offices, stores and restaurants realized paper towels were losing them money a while ago, leading many to implement air dryers in restrooms. The hand dryer was invented by George Clemens in 1948, and while all early dryers reduced need for paper, they weren’t totally environmentally friendly.

Inefficient, old-model hand dryers might be slightly more eco-friendly than paper towels, but why settle for that? If a dryer is pulling an excessive amount of electricity from its source, it is wasting power. Conventional dryers consume 0.023 kWh per use, and while newer, more efficient models consume as much as 80 percent less energy, they aren’t as widely implemented. Also, many conventional dryers just don’t do a good enough job of drying wet hands, leading to people grabbing paper towels or napkins to dry off. As it turns out, many of the eco-friendly dryers are the ones that do the best job of drying.

The paperless office of the future hasn’t yet come to fruition, but the paperless restroom, on the other hand, is much closer to reality. The following are a few of the more popular versions of eco-friendly hand dryers being used to limit energy usage and paper towel waste.

Dyson Airblade

The Airblade comes at a high price, over $1,000, but its running costs are impressively low. According to Dyson, the cost to operate the Airblade is one-fifteenth that of paper towels and one-fifth that of conventional dryers. The Airblade expels room-temperature air at over 400 miles per hour onto the user’s hands, resulting in a drying time of approximately 10 seconds, a quarter of the time a conventional dryer needs to get the job done.

BluStorm Hand Dryer

The BluStorm isn’t quite as fast as the Airblade, but it still manages to dry hands in 15 seconds. The manufacturer estimates the BluStorm saves 70% of the amount it would cost to operate a conventional dryer, and it also features a 60-second shutoff to prevent irregular or excessive use.

Excel XLERATOR

The XLERATOR is another dryer that promises to dry your hands in about 10 seconds. It’s priced around $500, making it a competitor to the comparably-priced BluStorm. It isn’t as eco-friendly as the Airblade, but it is definitely an upgrade over conventional dryers and paper towels.

Paper towel waste is one of the laziest ways we add to the waste stream. All to often do we pull paper towels from a dispenser and casually toss them in the trash. According to Earth911, 13 billion pounds of paper towels are used in the U.S. every year (I couldn’t find a comparable statistic for Canadians). Using the American example, if everyone in the US used one less paper towel a day, they’d save over 500 million pounds of waste. Now, how much could we save if we applied this Enviro Tip and stopped using them altogether?

Article originally published on www.usagain.com.  Reprinted with permission.